War Cry. Wilbur Smith
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her and spatter across the red earth all around her. There was a sudden explosive crack of thunder and only a couple of seconds later a dazzling flash of lightning. The wind whipped at her dress and within an instant her tears were washed from her face by torrential rain, and the sound of her crying was drowned by the roaring of the storm.
How is she?’ Leon shouted for the hundredth time, trying to make himself heard over the straining of the engine and the pounding of the rain, and received much the same answer from the back of the car as he had on every previous occasion. He was leaning back in the driver’s seat, his head half-turned to the back of the Rolls-Royce.
‘She’s very weak, Mr Courtney. But she’s still here.’ Dr Hugo Birchinall was behind him, sitting on the back seat with Eva cradled in his arms. ‘She’s a fighter, sir, you should be very proud of her. But Mr Courtney, may I give you a word of advice … as a doctor?’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Your wife is very ill indeed. There’s no guarantee she’ll make it. But she certainly won’t make it if we crash. So please, focus all your attention on your driving. It’ll help take your mind off things.’
Leon said nothing, but he turned his eyes back to the road ahead. Birchinall was right. It was an act of sheer desperation even to try to make the drive to Nairobi in this kind of weather. The distance wasn’t an issue. The Rolls’s six-cylinder, eighty-horsepower engine would make short work of the seventy-five miles between Gilgil and the Kenyan capital if the journey ran along flat, straight roads. But the truth was very different.
Like most of western Kenya, Gilgil lay within the confines of the Great Rift Valley, the stupendous tear in the earth’s surface that ran in a great arc southwards for almost four thousand miles, from the Red Sea coast of Ethiopia through the heart of East Africa to the Indian Ocean in Mozambique.
Nairobi, however, lay outside the Rift and the only way to reach it by car was a dirt road, surfaced with gravel that ran up the towering escarpment, as much as three thousand feet of virtually sheer rock at its highest points, that formed one side of the valley. The road clung to the side of this gargantuan natural wall, snaking and twisting, seeking every possible scrap of purchase as it rose and rose towards the summit.
There were no barriers of any kind at its side, nor even any markings to indicate where the road ended and the plummeting drop into the void began. Occasional trees clung to the scraps of rocky soil by the side of the road and a few enterprising, or possibly just foolhardy tradesmen had set up shacks, selling food and drinks on the very few patches of flat land, just a few yards wide, that lay between the road and the edge of the cliff.
On a clear, sunny day with a dry road beneath the wheels, the view from the road, looking out across the apparently limitless expanse of the Great Rift Valley, was a sight so heart-stopping in its magnificence that it justified the nervousness that even the most cool-headed driver or passenger felt when braving the escarpment road. And the fearful could console themselves that this petrifying stretch of their journey was less than ten miles in length. But when rain fell as hard as this it might as well have been ten thousand miles, for no sensible person even attempted to negotiate what swiftly became an impossibly treacherous cross between a muddy track and a rushing stream. The water didn’t just fall onto the road from the sky. It cascaded in torrents from the heights up above. So it was by no means uncommon for sections of the road’s surface to be washed away in really bad storms and any hostess who invited guests for a weekend anywhere within the valley did so on the mutual understanding that, if the weather turned bad, they might be there for a week.
But Eva Courtney could not wait a week, or even a day. Her only hope was to get to a hospital and the nearest one of any size at all was in Nairobi.
‘I’ll try to get a message through to let them know you’re coming,’ Doc Thompson had said. ‘Birchinall, you look after Mrs Courtney along the way. Courtney, you’d better pray that fancy car of yours is as powerful as you always tell us it is. And may God be with you, for you’ll need all the luck He can give.’
It was barely midday by the time they had set off. Eva’s first fit had passed, though others could be expected. Her face had lost its normal golden tan and was a ghostly, greyish white. Yet she seemed to be at peace, as if she were just sleeping as she was taken on a stretcher to the car and then laid on her side along the back seat. Leon had relented a little and let Saffron see her mother and whisper, ‘I love you,’ in her ear, but he had resisted his daughter’s increasingly frantic pleas to be allowed to come with them to the hospital and she had been taken away, kicking and screaming, to be driven back to Lusima in the truck with Manyoro, Loikot and the staff.
The first section of the drive was relatively straightforward as the road ran southeast along the valley floor. The rain was far too much for the Rolls’s windscreen wipers to cope with, but Leon knew the route so well that he only needed a few visual clues, no matter how blurred by water, to tell him where he was, and there was almost no other traffic on the road to worry about. He was even able, in a desperate attempt to talk about something, anything other than Eva’s plight, to tell Birchinall, ‘This storm has come at just the right time for your Mr de Lancey.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, I doubt he’s stripped down to his birthday suit and run round the polo field in this weather. Even if he did there’d be no one still left to watch him.’
‘I’m glad your chap won,’ Birchinall said. ‘Pluckiest thing I ever saw, taking on the three of us like that. It would have been rotten if van Doorn had come on and beaten him at the last. Can’t say I liked the cut of that Boer’s jib, truth be told. Charmless bunch, aren’t they?’
‘True enough. But they’d probably say that charm’s a luxury they can’t afford. And to do the man justice, he’s not like ninety-nine per cent of the other white men and women who were at the race today. He’s not a settler, or a colonist. He’s a proper African.’
‘So are you, from what I hear … If you don’t mind me saying so.’
‘Absolutely not, I take it as a compliment, which was how this ridiculous bet ever happened in the first place. Christ, I wish I’d never set de Lancey that wager. We’d have spent the day at home, no excitement. Eva would have been right as rain. I’ll never forgive myself if anything happens to her. Never!’
‘Don’t say that, Mr Courtney. Your wife has eclampsia. It could have struck her at any time, in any surroundings. As it was, it happened at a place that was a lot closer to Nairobi than your estate is, with two doctors immediately at hand. If anything, your wager has improved her chances, not lessened them.’
The road was starting to rise upwards now, passing through groves of spiky-leaved sisal and candelabra euphorbia, whose succulent stems branched out and up from a central tree trunk like a myriad green candles. As they went higher, more and more of the valley and the hills that rose from it were displayed before them.
‘Astonishing, isn’t it?’ Birchinall said. ‘Looks like something from the dawn of time. Just the power of it all.’
Leon knew just what the doctor meant, for the sun had entirely disappeared and the only illumination came from lightning bolts that could be seen flashing across the sky, striking one mountain ridge after another with their searing blasts of pure white light – the mountains just a darker shade of black against the deep purples and charcoal greys of the sky. It truly seemed as though the bolts were being hurled down from the heavens by unseen gods, as though the vast power they contained held the spark of life itself, as well as the destructive force of death.
And then the road swung upwards again, curled this way and that and suddenly they were on the side of the escarpment, on a road that seemed barely wider than the car itself and, just at the point when the surface became most treacherous, so it was almost completely exposed to the full force of the wind and rain. Leon had ordered the most powerful headlights possible for his car, but the beams barely penetrated the watery, murky gloom. He could see a small patch of road surface directly in front of the bonnet, but beyond that there was nothing but darkness, and it was quite impossible to tell whether the blackness